Spotify is not interested in squeezing more money out of Nigerian listeners, it wants more of them paying for music at all. That is the clear message from Jocelyne Muhutu-Remy, Spotify’s Sub-Saharan Africa Managing Director, who told TechCabal that the platform’s growth strategy in Nigeria is built on volume and habit, not price hikes. “We cannot just say, let us try to meet our benchmark and multiply and increase unreasonably,” she said. “We need to take into consideration people’s reality.”
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That reality is reflected in Spotify’s current Nigerian pricing. At roughly ₦1,600 per month, just $1.16, Premium in Nigeria is one of the cheapest on the continent. Compare that to $4.29 in South Africa, $3.23 in Kenya, and $2.07 in Ghana, and the gap is impossible to ignore. But rather than close it by raising prices, Spotify is doubling down on access: telco partnerships, local payment integrations, and flexible options designed to bring more Nigerians through the door as paying subscribers.
The logic here is sound when you look at the numbers. Nigerian artists earned roughly ₦1.98 per stream on Spotify in 2025, a figure Muhutu-Remy acknowledges is low, but one she says will improve as the market grows. “That is the reality now, but it will evolve with volume, with the growth of the market,” she said. Artist payouts in Nigeria grew 140% between 2023 and 2025, though that growth slowed to just 3.45% between 2024 and 2025, largely because local streams, which carry less commercial weight than international ones, rose by 170% in the same period.
Here is where Spotify’s thinking gets genuinely interesting: a Nigerian fan streaming locally might only contribute a dollar to the ecosystem, but their influence travels far beyond Nigeria’s borders. “Just because Spotify costs less in Nigeria does not mean a Nigerian fan is less valuable,” Muhutu-Remy said. “It takes a Nigerian to take Nigerian music out of Nigeria. So that person streaming in Nigeria may only be paying a dollar, but they have got ten family members in Canada, in the US, who are paying double digits.” The South African market tells a similar story, nearly 74% of the $30.69 million earned by South African artists on Spotify in 2025 came from listeners outside the country.
Spotify currently operates in 184 markets with 761 million active users and close to 300 million paying subscribers. Streaming accounted for 69.6% of global recorded music revenues in 2025, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Nigeria, despite its low per-stream economics, sits at the centre of Spotify’s African ambitions. Nigeria is a superpower from a cultural perspective,” Muhutu-Remy said. “It has the foundation to be a commercial superpower because the right conditions are there. For Spotify, the question is no longer whether Nigeria matters , it is how fast the paying user base can grow to match the cultural one.
